Parker died last week at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 77. His wife stepped out for a class, and he was at his desk, writing. When she came back, she found him still at his desk, but no longer one of the living. I do feel very bad for her; it's a terrible loss and one that one doesn't ever really recover from. You just learn to go on. I've only lately come to admire Parker; a mere two years. But I've been reading all I can. I admit that I'm partial to the Spenser novels, as I've noted before. But I want to talk about one of the ways Parker has left a lasting mark, a legacy, that will go on, long after I'm gone. Parker was honest about the world and about people in ways that not any people are. I've written before about how Spenser's sidekick Hawk is a black guy who defeats both of the major stereotypes of black men in fiction; Hawk is neither a Noble Savage nor an unthinking street thug/gangsta. Hawk is complicated and conflicted, which, frankly, most of us are, and does both the wrong thing for the right reasons, and the right thing, for the wrong reasons.

Perhaps even more importantly (because it less common), Parker is one of a handful of mainstream genre writers who wrote about gay and lesbian characters as people. He has queer characters whose human foibles are far more important than their romantic attachments' sex. The first Parker book I read was his sixth Spenser novel; Looking for Rachel Wallace (1980). Wallace hires Spenser to protect her. She's a political activist and a lesbian. Parker portrays both Wallace and Spenser believably, without indulging in any of the standard tropes for mainstream fiction with queer characters. Wallace is neither dead nor straight at the end and Spenser is neither politically correct nor homophobic; just human, intelligent and compassionate.

Parker, whose Ph.D. dissertation was on Chandler and Hammett, deliberately set out to use Chandler as a model. But by the second Spenser novel Parker's own voice and Spenser's character had firmly supplanted the voice of Chandler. I note that Parker has a YA Spenser novel, a series of Westerns (the film Appaloosa was based on Parker's novel) and two other series about a female detective Sunny Randall, and another about Jesse Stone. You can find the complete list here.